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Autism Study Yanked

But it's not likely to affect the anti-vaccine movement.

Finally: after almost a dozen years, scores of
studies undercutting its conclusions, and a years-long disavowal by most
of the authors, the infamous paper that first claimed a link between childhood vaccinations and autism has been formally retracted by The Lancet, the medical journal that published it in 1998.

Ten
of the 13 authors had previously—in 2004—retracted the claim that the
measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is linked to autism, but
because the primary author, Andrew Wakefield, had not, the paper
remained as part of the scientific literature, albeit with a big fat
asterisk. The belated retraction was triggered not by a long-overdue
recognition that the study was scientifically flawed, however, but by an
official ruling that it had been conducted in violation of the standard
ethical norms of scientific research.

To summarize, as I
recounted in a story last year, the study claimed to have found severe
intestinal inflammation in children who had just days before received
the MMR. Because nine of the children also had autism, with symptoms
appearing between one and 14 days after the vaccination, Wakefield
concluded that the shot had damaged the children's intestines. According
to his convoluted hypothesis, the measles part of the vaccine had
caused serious inflammation of the gut, allowing harmful proteins to
leak from there into the bloodstream and then to the brain, where they
damaged neurons in a way that triggered autism.

That allegation unleashed more than a decade—and counting—of
hysteria that childhood vaccines are behind the rising incidence of
autism, which has soared from one in 300 in 2000 to just over one in 100
in the latest U.S. government count. Parents have refused to let their children be vaccinated, leading to an increase in the rate of measles.

The
British panel investigating the MMR-autism study had a different focus,
however. For years allegations of ethical improprieties have dogged
Wakefield. An investigation by The Sunday Times of London
revealed that some of the children in his study were clients of a lawyer
working on a case against vaccine makers; Wakefield also received
£55,000 from Britain's Legal Aid Board, which supports research related
to lawsuits. Those revelations prompted Lancet editor Richard
Horton to say, in 2004, "If we knew then what we know now, we certainly
would not have published the part of the paper that related to MMR…There
were fatal conflicts of interest."

A 2004 investigation into whether the study had broken any rules of ethical research cleared the scientists. Last month, however, Britain's General Medical Council
completed a new two-and-a-half-year investigation into whether
Wakefield & Co. followed proper research ethics in their study, and
the answer was no. The 143-page decision (you can find a PDF of the report here) calls Wakefield's conduct "dishonest" and "misleading" in numerous respects. But the bottom line is that he misled The Lancet about
how children came to be studied (that is, through the attorneys), that
the ethical statement in the paper (denying any conflict of interest)
was false, and that the hospital where the research was conducted had
not approved it. Most damning, the GMC found that Wakefield "showed a
callous disregard for the distress and pain that [he] knew or ought to
have known the children involved might suffer," that he "abused [his]
position of trust as a medical practitioner," and that he brought "the
medical profession into disrepute."

The Lancet retraction
will certainly not derail the anti-vaccine movement, or even—I'll bet a
nickel—give it pause. The General Medical Council stated explicitly
that "the Panel wish to make it clear that this case is not concerned
with whether there is or might be any link between the MMR vaccination
and autism." Ironically, its findings about "callous disregard" for
children and bringing medicine "into disrepute" apply most forcefully to
the storm Wakefield unleashed, not to the niceties of bioethics that he
failed to observe.